CHINESE AND OTHER LANGUAGES



CHINESE AND OTHER LANGUAGES

Just as English is connected to many other languages in the Indo-European family, Chinese is a member of a language family called Sino-Tibetan. This family also includes the Tibeto-Burman group, which is named after its two most important members, Tibetan and Burmese. Both of these languages have been written for around one thousand years in scripts developed from Indian ones. There are many other Tibeto-Burman languages spoken in the Himalayas and other areas west and south-west of China but most of them have not been written down until recently and so we know less about their history. One Tibeto-Burman language sometimes heard in Hong Kong is Gurung. This is the mother tongue of many of the Nepalis in Hong Kong and is closely related to Tibetan.

Only a small number of matching words have been found so far in the different Sino-Tibetan languages, but there are enough correspondences to make us sure that the languages really are connected. The table below shows some words as we think they may have been pronounced in Old Chinese, i.e. the language of the Shijing (詩經), a collection of poems composed over several hundred years from 1000 B.C. onwards. The English meanings are also given. See if you can fill in the columns with the Mandarin, Cantonese, Old Tibetan and old Burmese words listed at the bottom. You need to remember that ng should be pronounced as two separate sounds (`n' plus `g'), that y is the vowel sound in the Cantonese word for `book' and c is a sound made with the tongue in between the positions for t and for k. Other symbols have the same sound as in the phonetic script used in English dictionaries. (i.e. ə as in about, j as in yes and ŋ as in sing).. The `X' in the Burmese column shows where the original Sino-Tibetan word has been lost from the language.

ENGLISH CHINESE CHARACTER MANDARIN CANTONESE OLD CHINESE TIBETAN BURMESE

I 我 ____wu__ ___ ŋo__ ngag ___ nga _ __ŋa_____

three 三 ____san_ __sam__ səm ___gsum_ __sum___

year 年 ___nian_ ___nin__ nin ___ning_ ___hnac__

name 名 ____ miŋ_ ___miŋ __ mjing ___ming_ ___man___

eye 目 ____mu__ ___muk__ mjəkw ___mig___ ___myak_

dog 犬 ___quan_ ___hyun_ khwin __khyi__ ____khew_

cold 冷 ____leng_ ___lang__ gljang __grang_ ___X____

poison 毒 ___du____ ___duk_ dəkw ___dug__ ___tok__

die 死 ___si___ ____sei_ sjid __shi-ba_ __se____

kill 殺 ___sha_ ___sat__ srat ___bsat__ ___sat___

Mandarin: si, quan, du, miŋ , leng, wu, san, sha, nian, mu

Cantonese: sam, duk, ŋo , sei, muk, nin, lang, hyun, mi , sat

Tibetan: shi-ba, nga, ming, bsat, ning, khyi, mig, dug, grang, gsum

Burmese: hnac, -man, sat, khwe, se, sum, myak, tok, ŋa

There are also many similarities between Chinese and the Tai group of languages, which includes Thai, Lao (the language of Laos) and the languages of a number of minorities in China itself. If you have been on holiday in Thai

land, you may have noticed that the Thai numbers are very like Cantonese. Some scholars believe that the Tai languages are a branch of the Sino-Tibetan family, but others believe that they belong to a different family and have

only borrowed words from Chinese.

Because from early times Chinese civilisation was more developed than that of other peoples in East Asia, the Chinese language has had a very great influence on neighbouring countries. Until the beginning of this century, Chinese was used as a language of administration and literature in Japan, Korea and Vietnam. Educated people in these countries had to learn Chinese in the same way that Europeans needed to learn Latin in the Middle Ages or people all over the world now learn English.

For many centuries, Chinese has not often borrowed foreign words but has preferred to make new words by combining existing ones. However, before Chinese culture became so advanced, other languages may have influenced Chinese. In nearly all modern Chinese dialects, the word for dog inherited from Old Chinese (khwin) has been replaced by another word, which may have been borrowed from the early language of the Miao-Yao minority peoples. Another example is the word jiang (Cantonese gong), which now can be used for any river but used to be a name only for the Yangtze. The Old Chinese pronunciation was probably krung and this is very like krong in Vietnamese and krung

in Mon (a language spoken in SE Asia), which also mean `river'. These two languages belong to the Austroasiatic languages and the similarity is evidence that Austoasiatic speakers may have lived around the Yangtze before the Chinese spread south from the Yellow River area.

Answer the following questions:

1. In paragraph 1, line 4, what noun could replace `ones'?

scripts

2. Why do we not know much about the history of most Tibeto-Burman languages?

Because most of them were only written down recently

3. What type of sounds from Old Chinese are normally kept in Cantonese but lost in Mandarin?

Final consonants like `k’ nd `t’

4. Tick the correct statement:

a) Latin is a similar language to Chinese

b) The roles of Latin and Chinese used to be similar (

5. Which Chinese word was probably borrowed from Miao-Yao? (Try to write the Cantonese form in Roman letters - don't write the pinyin spelling of the Mandarin or the Chinese character!).

gau

6. How do we know that Austroasiatic peoples may once have lived near the Yangtze

Their word for `river’ is like the old Chinese name for the river

Fill in the chart to show the relationship between the different languages and dialects mentioned in the passage which are certainly or possibly part of the Sino-Tibetan family (Mandarin, Tai, Tibeto-Burman, Cantonese, Old Chinese,

Thai, Burmese, Tibetan, Lao)

Mandarin

Old Chinese

Cantonese

Burmese

Sino-Tibetan Tibeto-Burman

Tibetan

Gurung

Thai

Tai

Lao

For discussion:

1. Cantonese is about as different from Mandarin as French is from Italian. Why do we call French and Italian `languages' but usually call Cantonese and Mandarin dialects?

Because Cantonese and Mandarin speakers are part of one state but French and Italian speakers are not.

`A language is a dialect with an army and a navy’

2. Have you noticed any changes in the pronunciation of Cantonese happening at the moment? (Think of words which younger people pronounce differently from older ones)

Loss of distinction between the half `k’ and `t’ at the end of words (e.g. 失車 v. 塞車)

Loss of distinction between `ŋ’ and `n’

3. In the last century an American predicted that in a hundred years American and British English would become so different that speakers of one would not be able to understand the other. In fact, the differences are still quite small. What has kept the speed of change very low?

Because of modern communications, radio etc. which mean people are still influenced by pronunciation in distant countries

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